[Wow! December 1 already! If you’re in the market for stocking-stuffers and/or gifts for your reading friends (and yourself), don’t forget books. Print is a wee bit too big for the stocking, but an Amazon gift card for ebook purchases fits nicely there. Reading is the most exciting and educational entertainment you can do. No computer game or movie lets you get inside the minds of characters–that’s mind-blowing!]

When I thought about writing my first YA novel, The Secret Lab, I perused many YA novels and read many words of advice, sometimes contradictory, about how to write one. Now that I’m in the midst of writing another, I’m reconsidering what I learned or didn’t learn, factoring in some observed behavior from readers, past and potential reviewers, recent books, and our changing times.

First, let’s consider the traditional definition of YA (young adult) literature. These books were designed for tweens and teens 12-18 with plots, characters, and settings appropriate for that age group as well as their parents who wanted to shelter those kids from questionable content that might damage young minds. Yeah, that definition is intentionally snarky; moreover, it’s completely wrong now, if it ever was right. You might say the first books of the Harry Potter series are YA fantasy and satisfy that definition, but the last aren’t YA at all, just dark fantasy. In our present cultural morass where kids have to deal with sexual identity and bullying and worry about perverts and school shootings, kids, starting with the millennials, have had to and do grow up fast and face challenges previous generations didn’t have to worry about until they were in the workforce. Parents might still want to protect their children, but their children might be exposed to many things they can’t even imagine. How else can you explain two girls trying to sacrifice a friend in order to please some internet fictional character?

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[Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!]

For me, probably DOA. I have three collections (not counting the one I offer as a PDF free for the asking), and they sell zilch. Two are even priced low in order to serve as an introduction to my writing. It doesn’t matter. They don’t do well. I have a short story in a crime anthology too. But whether crime/mystery/thriller or sci-fi, it just seems readers aren’t interested in short stories or novellas.

That’s hard to understand. In our current hectic lifestyles, I can understand that a reader doesn’t want to start a long novel. I barely got through the last Harry Potter novel (verbosity is always Rawling’s friend), had a terrible time with Eco’s Name of the Rose (I kept losing track of the story line), and never could finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace (maybe we could get rid of Putin if he read it?). But short stories and novellas—maybe one day for the former and two or three for the latter. And, while I never set out to write a story of specific length, I can also write a short story in a couple of days. (When I had a day-job, I’d often write them out on napkins when I went for coffee.)

If you read my review of the movie Arrival, you saw that I made reference to Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” the novella the movie is based on. It’s contained in a collection with another five stories (both of my inexpensive collections have six stories too). OK, it’s a twist on the alien invasion theme, but many authors have written twists on that (including me)—how was he noticed? That collection is now on my TBRoR-list (“To Be Read or Reviewed”), but I’ll have to wait awhile because the Kindle version is far too expensive. (The Kindle version is $11.99 for an equivalent 306 print pages. My Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape is $2.99 for an equivalent 234 pages. If you do the math, I should be selling mine for $9—but who said ebook pricing is logical?).

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Some people consider these three words to be genres, but now they’re just keywords that help readers figure out what the plot is about or what is emphasized, and, in many cases, a short story, novella, or novel can be described by all three.  Crime stories (often called police procedurals when involving cops) focus on the crime solvers and their techniques. Mysteries are often more cerebral and focus on who committed the crime and why, and the mystery solvers are more likely to be ordinary people, not pros—the reader doesn’t know who committed the crime and the author often includes misdirects to confuse her or him so s/he can’t guess who did it. In a thriller, the reader is likely to know who committed the crime, or who is planning to commit one, and the protagonist(s) are more concerned with stopping it.

Consider a story about a serial killer. That’s one case where all those keywords can apply, and the most appropriate keyword just indicates an emphasis. For the crime writer, a cop will match wits with the serial killer, try to find out who s/he is (most serial killers are males, though, so a female could be a twist), and then apprehend the perp. The mystery writer might also have a protagonist match wits with the killer and try to find out who s/he is, but there might be many misdirects and even events from the protagonist’s past that connect her or him to the killer. The thriller writer would tend to alternate between the serial killer and those chasing him, letting the reader get into the minds of both, and action scenes might be featured more (see a previous writing post).  Clearly all these stories can have elements of crime, mystery, and thrills.

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November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time, so I was interested to see a wannabe author write to the “Personal Tech” column of the NY Times: “…what free or cheap software would work to temporarily lock me out of Facebook and other time-sapping sites?” The Times’ columnist surrounded the correct answer with a lot of blather (that’s called padding, folks), but that correct answer was spot on: “One free approach is to just unplug your home network router….” Well, yeah! Beyond the absurdity of this interchange and the two split infinitives that would have made these person’s high school English teachers cringe, neither uncommon today, the Times’ columnist skirted two issues associated with the query.

First, let’s kill the myth: A novel cannot be written in a month. We’ll ignore NaNoWriMo’s definition of novel—50 kwords, their minimum, isn’t a novel, irrespective of the fact that The Great Gatsby, about that length, is called one (that length of story could only be called a novel in YA literature, and Fitzgerald’s genre, whatever it is, can’t be called YA). OK, echoing a famous politician’s infamous husband, I suppose it depends on how you define “written.”

I produced some of the manuscripts for my novels in a month. In the days of typewriters, we used to call such manuscripts “first drafts,” but those novels of mine included content editing because one can do cut and paste with almost any modern word processing software. That still doesn’t meet my definition of “written.” A manuscript has to age a bit—you might like Beaujolais, but the equivalent in a novel isn’t particularly good for readers’ palates. Moreover, as you copy edit (or fight with your copy editor, who you pay NOT to respect what you’ve written), you will see other content editing that needs to be done, and your beta-readers will see more (maybe that getaway car changed from red to blue in the middle of a chase?).

In brief: the whole NaNoWriMo concept is a gimmick at best and a way to encourage sloppy writing at worst. But let’s move on to a bigger question: what the Times’ reader was really worrying about is how to handle distractions when writing. Avoiding social media is only part of that. While anyone can publish a book nowadays (but many people shouldn’t, considering all the crap out there—NaNoWriMo contributes to that glut, of course, and Sturgeon’s law definitely applies), finishing a good novel, no matter the time taken, is an accomplishment that requires focus and concentration.

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The minimalist writing technique I use applies to action scenes as well as it does to other writing elements when constructing your short story, novella, or novel. Often called hard-boiled in the detective literature, it means adding just enough detail so your reader can participate in the creative process and form his own picture of the action taking place. The key words of course are “enough detail.” Goldilocks says not too little and not too much, but just enough. But what is “enough detail”?

First, you have to state who the participants are. Even if it’s Detective Joe fighting a mysterious stranger, you have to say his opponent is a mysterious stranger. Second, you have to say who is doing what to whom. He did something to him can be confusing—generally speaking, the reader knows these are different people, but which one is Detective Joe and which one the mysterious stranger? Third, strong action verbs are better, the correct verb must be chosen for each action, and cause and effect must be logical. Hit, for example, is often too generic. Is the hit a slap, punch, stiff arm, fist to the windpipe, etc? Fourth, use internal dialogue carefully. Detective Joe won’t hesitate and think about using his left or right fist—he’ll probably just react.

While most of my books have action scenes sprinkled through them, when I wrote Rogue Planet I carefully studied novels containing battle and swashbuckling scenes because almost the whole book marches from action scene to action scene, with only a wee bit of respite. In brief, some stories have a lot more action than others. When the scales are tilted to action, the author better work a bit more on getting it right. That depends on the readers, of course—it’s all subjective—so I should say, getting it right for most of the readers, many of whom read a lot and aren’t too forgiving about major gaffes.

Rather than take examples from my books, though, let me consider a true life incident that was on the news recently. A perp allegedly tried to steal some things in an NYC deli, got into a fight with the employee, and then dashed out. A sixty-nine-year-old woman was standing in his way. Cut to the endgame: the old woman is in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage.  I want to focus on the action in between that I didn’t describe.

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I never could decipher the adage “Don’t put the cart before the horse” to my satisfaction.  That frustration was partial motivation for writing “The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” Detective Castilblanco’s first case as a homicide detective—the story appears in the collection World Enough and Crime.  The conundrum: Why would anyone want a horse if s/he didn’t already own a cart? Maybe the implication is that a horse has a lot more uses than just dragging a cart around?  That’s true, but it begs the question.  If someone has a little cart, s/he’d get a little pony, like you see in kiddies’ parks; if someone has a huge cart loaded down with bricks, s/he’d get a Clydesdale.  The correct horse for the cart should obviously be chosen AFTER the cart!

Or maybe I don’t understand the adage because I have it in the wrong order?  Maybe it’s supposed to be “Don’t put the horse before the cart”?  The only horses most of us worry about anymore are those in their cars, and not so much of that anymore unless you’re into muscle cars—modern cars have been “tuned” to a T for max performance from min horses.  But I grew up in the Big Valley, farm and ranch country, so I was exposed to a lot of equestrian lore.  Even though I left that agriculturally rich area when I was 18 and didn’t look back much, that lore stuck with me.  (The main character’s life with his horse in the first part of Survivors of the Chaos was inspired by my father’s early life.)  I had a brother and cousin who broke horses, after all.  My brother broke one of Mom’s little porcelain horses; my cousin broke real horses, rancher-lingo for training a horse to tolerate a rider.

No matter the order of the saying or how we interpret it, it’s segue to the following question: What comes first, the book’s audience or the book? In a previous post about story forms, I said something like “build it (the story) and they will come (the readers).”  Unlike the cart and the horse, this is pretty clear: an author can’t build an audience for a single book, he can only “build a book”! S/he has a story to tell and, when she tells it, s/he can only hope there will be an audience to read it.  That can be helped along by pre-publication publicity and previous books, but neither one offers guarantees.  In fact, previous books can kill the audience s/he has, although readers can be forgiving if they like the premise of the new book.

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Last month Lionel Shriver “belittled” the movement against cultural appropriation at the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia (felt I had to add the last for the geographically challenged who don’t know where Brisbane is—not as bad as not knowing about Aleppo, but telling). I’ve never read anything by Shriver. I’ll have to confess, I’d never heard of Ms. Shriver, and she’s probably never heard of me. BUT I AGREE WITH HER…to a point. You might be already considering the movement she’s complaining about as a storm in a teacup. If not, read on. I hope to convince you that’s exactly what it is. (BTW, pox on the organizers of that conference who decided to give the protestors equal time. Giving wingnuts a podium is a big mistake…always.)

First, telling a writer of fiction s/he can’t use her or his imagination to write ABOUT ANYTHING s/he desires is wrong on so many levels that no debate is really needed, but here are two obvious counters: (1) I’ve written many novels where the MC (main character) is a woman. Let me hasten to add that Steven M. Moore is not a pen name; I’m not a female author writing as a male one (some do, with some justification, but it goes the other way too—female writers who write mystery and thrillers might use a male pen name). I’ve known enough strong women in my life that I believe I understand them (that might be delusional, but it’s what I believe). Some of my female MCs are even in the first person where I had to get “inside their heads.” (2) I’ve written sci-fi novels where an MC or important character is an ET. Is that kind of “cultural appropriation” to be banned too?

You should be able to see how foolish this movement is. But onward: You might counter the above by saying the movement is talking about human cultures, not sexual or ET identity. I’m sure this movement will unload on me about characters who are Hispanic too: WASC Moore dares to write about Hispanic culture! (WASC is “White Anglo-Saxon Catholic”—some Hispanics are blond-haired and blue-eyed, folks, and many of them are Catholic.) FYI for those who’ve never read my bios: For 10+ years I was completely immersed in one Hispanic culture, Colombia’s. My first wife was Colombian. By the time I left Colombia, I was dreaming in Spanish. And Colombia respects, even adores, cultural aspects from around Latin America; music at parties were always a mix of Colombian music (already a mix from various regions of the country), rancheros, tangos, and many other forms of Latin music, without even counting the dance music (OK, the tango is a dance, but it’s the sung version, made famous by Gardel, that turns Colombians on—he died in a plane crash near Medellin, Colombia.)

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This subgenre of sci-fi (or set of key words to describe a plot) waxes and wanes and generally reflects the pessimism in society.  Often a reaction to a real or perceived threat, books described by one or both these key words have attracted readers.  I’d read all the classics before I entered high school.  Maybe this is unusual for a lad who was supposed to be more curious about those strange creatures called girls, but it was the Cold War.  Reading pessimistic books about my possible future seemed natural.  Boring drills when we hid under our desks to “protect us from the Russian bombs” didn’t help, especially when I was punished for telling teachers they were stupid to believe the drills would save anyone.

Huxley’s Brave New World and Ape and Essence, Wells’s The Time Machine, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and a few others I can’t remember interested me much more than the assigned books on our class reading lists.  I suppose I raised a few eyebrows when I’d make book reports on “elective reading” I’d done, although dystopian and post-apocalyptic books seemed safer than some other books I read (notes to my parents would have been forthcoming for Tom Jones and Fanny Hill, I’m sure—teachers and parents like to think they can control a child’s reading habits!).

I graduated to books like Bradley’s Fahrenheit 451, Kornbluth’s Not This August, and Christopher’s No Blade of Grass that were seminal for some of my own stories, not in plot but in structure: the world goes to hell, but there are a few individuals who can make it a wee bit better.  While pure dystopian and post-apocalyptic books still exist—Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is an example (a book she calls speculative fiction is post-apocalyptic sci-fi, of course)—making readers want to slash their wrists or suck on a shotgun seems less fulfilling than leaving them with some optimism.  The best books of this type do just that, like Not this August and No Blade of Grass, while even famous ones like Fahrenheit 451 fail.

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Readers don’t worry too much about this question, except when an author tries to scam them with a “novel” that’s 10 kwords (the other extreme is possible too: I’ve become annoyed when I want to just read a nice short story, and it turns out to be a 30-40 kword novella).  Readers only want to read a good story, period. Maybe they worry more about genre than plot (genres nowadays are just key words to describe a plot) and have reasonable criteria—for example, no porn and in English (I’ll read a story in French or Spanish, but many people wouldn’t).

Authors have to worry about two aspects of this question: First, should you set out to write one particular form? Second, no matter how you arrive at the finished product, how does the form change your attended audience?  Compared to more important writing challenges like plot, characterization, dialogue, settings, flashbacks v. back story, first or third person, point of view, and so forth, these two questions are less important, but the final form might reflect on how you handle those writing challenges.

My last comment is an argument for determining the form before you start on your writing journey. In fact, there are situations where doing that is an absolute constraint. If an ezine or traditional magazine requires a short story between 3 and 5 kwords, you have to be within those limits; you can’t even send a short story of 8 kwords!  That might imply cutting back on dialogue and characterization, for example—that kind of brief short story has few characters and those few aren’t going to be talking a lot.  There’s something to be said for this kind of constrained writing because it teaches you to be a minimalist writer.  That means you have to learn not to be a verbose storyteller and to let readers participate in the creative process by, for example, giving them only enough hints about characters to develop their own mental images and behavioral perceptions.

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President Obama and First Lady Michelle will each write one after he leaves the presidency—maybe the ex-President’s title will be How I Learned to Love Hillary? Bill O’Reilly will probably come out with another Killing… book (he’s already killed Jesus). Elizabeth Vargas will probably have a sequel to her new book called An Alcoholic’s Secret Recipes for Cocktails. I’m also waiting for Roger Ailes’s manual for how to get away with sexual harassment for so long—I’ll put it next to my Win 10 manuals in a plain brown wrapper. (Note how PC I am—both ABC News and Fox News incur my wrath equally.)

What do these past, ready-to-release, or future books have in common? They are all written by celebrity “authors,” for whom I have no respect, in order to rake in millions in advances and royalties at the expense of readers hooked on such books. Most of these readers haven’t read a good book in their life—they’re the types who read Hamlet in Cliff Notes in college English (if they went to college). The Big Five’s business model in this case is clear and channels P. T. Barnum—there’s a sucker born every minute, and a good number of them read books by celebrities.

Sour grapes? In a way, I suppose that’s true. In their defense, these readers are exploited by the Big Five. So are the celebrities for the most part—the common denominator being publishers’ greed—but the exploitation of the celebrities is mitigated by the fat paychecks. But greed isn’t their only sin either. Most of these people can’t even write. Bill O’Reilly at least gives credit where it’s due—the ghostwriter Martin Dugard appears as a coauthor, but after Bill’s name, of course. While even real authors pull these stunts (James Patterson is one of the worst), it’s sad when the celebrity author hasn’t done much of the work. I’d wager that 99% of books by celebrities are written by ghostwriters—maybe that puts some food on the table for the ghostwriters, but the celebrities take home the lion’s share of royalties when they’re just parasitic hyenas.

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